A 'Grass Roots' Campaign to Take Down Amazon Is Funded by Amazon's Biggest Rivals

[Kilgore]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-grassroots-campaign-to-take-down-amazon-is-funded-by-amazons-biggest-rivals-11568989838

Be careful of stories trashing Amazon. Not all are what they seem. Unfortunately the full article is behind a paywall. Its quite lenghty and detailed regarding Amazon's rivals effort to take them down.

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Walmart, Oracle and mall owner Simon Property Group are secret funders behind a nonprofit that has been highly critical of the e-commerce giant

About 18 months ago a new nonprofit group called Free and Fair Markets Initiative launched a national campaign criticizing the business practices of one powerful company: Amazon.com Inc.

Free and Fair Markets accused Amazon of stifling competition and innovation, inhibiting consumer choice, gorging on government subsidies, endangering its warehouse workers and exposing consumer data to privacy breaches. It claimed to have grass-roots support from average citizens across the U.S, citing a labor union, a Boston management professor and a California businessman.

What the group did not say is that it received backing from some of Amazon’s chief corporate rivals. They include shopping mall owner Simon Property Group Inc. [US:SPG], retailer Walmart Inc. [US:WMT] and software giant Oracle Corp. [US:ORCL], according to people involved with and briefed on the project. Simon Property is fighting to keep shoppers who now prefer to buy what they need on Amazon; Walmart is competing with Amazon over retail sales; and Oracle is battling Amazon over a $10 billion Pentagon cloud-computing contract.

The grass-roots support cited by the group was also not what it appeared to be. The labor union says it was listed as a member of the group without permission and says a document purporting to show that it gave permission has a forged signature. The Boston professor says the group, with his permission, ghost-wrote an op-ed for him about Amazon but that he didn’t know he would be named as a member. The California businessman was dead for months before his name was removed from the group’s website this year.

[hlthe2b]

1. Amazon is problematic, especially for workers, but how the hell does Walmart come out looking "good"

comparatively? It sure as hell does not.

I'm not going to boycott Amazon, but I am surely going to continue to try to support local buying and will be very selective in what I buy and how (ordering when I can batch an order, for example so that I don't add to the very unnecessary and environmentally devastating 'over-delivery' process.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

2. astroturfing, aka stealth marketing, is not new

We're all wading through it every day.

[dalton99a]

3. Genuine nonprofits also oppose Amazon's tactics.

https://ilsr.org/amazon/

[Tennessee Hillbilly]

4. there may be a trump connection

I don't remember where, but several years ago I saw a story about how trump and some of his wealthy acquaintances had made investments in various malls and shopping centers that had lost a lot of market value because of competition from Amazon. The story said that this is the main reason that trump hates Amazon.

In other words, Amazon's success caused trump and some of his wealthy acquaintances to lose a lot of money.